With a Little Help From his Friends

 

If we can't pinpoint the origin of a distant ancestor through the information usually provided in more modern times, perhaps we can get a little help from his friends in determining the family's history. When it comes to my fourth great-grandfather Job Tison—a.k.a. Job Tyson—I've heard stories, but I haven't been able to verify them as facts. It's time to reach out to examine a second point of view: the clues we can find through the friends, associates, and neighbors of our mystery ancestor.

In Job Tison's case, it seems he spent most of his adult life in Glynn County, Georgia. Certainly by 1820, his name appeared—as Job "Tyson"—in the Glynn County census, but that was only a few years before he drew up his will.

His will, as it turns out, provided us with two names of trusted associates: Charles McClellan and J. H. McClellan, whose name later in the document was rendered as Joseph H. McClellan. These two McClellan men became the witnesses of Job Tyson's will, with Joseph appearing in court on September 21, 1824, to testify concerning the decedent's last testament.

Conveniently for us as we research the extended family of Job Tyson, at least Charles McClellan figures in the future history of Job's descendants. Charles, it turns out, was father of George McClellan, who a few years later became husband of Job's daughter Sidnah. 

Charles McClellan, it turns out, lived one county to the south of Job Tyson's wayside inn in Glynn County.  By 1817, his name appeared in headright and bounty documents in Camden County, a Georgia county which at that time formed the southernmost international border between the United States and the Spanish claim to a territory which eventually became the state of Florida. No surprise, then, to see Charles and his family eventually migrate farther south, once that Florida territory became the possession of the United States.

How Charles McClellan became a close enough associate with Job Tyson to be asked to witness his will, I can't say. For our purposes today, though, I was curious to determine just where Charles McClellan might have originated, in case he and Job were associates from a time before their residence in Georgia.

Constructing a family tree for Charles' children—mainly to advance their story to records of a later date to reveal their own places of birth—it was easy to spot the change in the family's location. For the five McClellan children born before Charles received the 1817 authorization to survey his newly-acquired property in Georgia, each child was said to have been born in South Carolina. Even the child born after that point—son Charles in 1819—was a South Carolina native. Only with the birth in 1822 of his next son, Samuel, did the census listings of births switch to Georgia.

Granted, from that 1822 date until Job Tyson's will was drawn up in early 1824 was not much time to develop a new friendship, or even a working relationship. That might suggest that Job Tyson and Charles McClellan knew each other prior to their respective relocations to Georgia. But South Carolina? I've seen people state that Job Tyson's family came from North Carolina. This didn't seem to confirm such a F.A.N. Club notion.

There was, however, another person to turn to in seeking Job's origin. The one pointing the way might have been Job Tyson's own father-in-law, West Sheffield, a Revolutionary War Patriot we'll consider tomorrow.